Plan B Forum

Jim

You've gone on record saying you'd campaign Hillary if Paul got the nod. Who would you vote for if other candidates got on the ticket?

Evry one else feel free to mix and match your "nightmare" ticket with the best opposition ticket that might convince you to go to the other side.

That's an interesting question, CP...

I'd put them in different categories:

There are three candidates that I could support over Hillary with a level of actual enthusiasm:

Bush, Rubio and Kasich (for a while I didn't think Kasich was going to run, but it appears now that he's definitely going to be in. )

There are several others I would support if they're nominated, but not with an over abundance of enthusiasm:

Walker, Christie, Jindal, Perry, and maybe Huckabee and Fiorina (bearing in mind of course that except for Walker, none of these have any real chance of being nominated. Christie's moment has probably passed; he should have run in 2012.)

Then there's another group that I probably wouldn't be able to bring myself to vote for, but who wouldn't drive me to actually support Hillary. (I'd either cast a third party protest vote, or not vote. Getting me to actually support Hillary is a VERY high bar; Paul meets it because I consider his views on national defense and national security to be a serious danger to the safety of the country. )

In this group:

Carson, Cruz, and Santorum...(At one time I thought Santorum could be a credible candidate, but he really went off the deep end)

The good news (for me) is that none of those three has any real chance of actually being nominated.

I've probably left somebody out...

I just thought of somebody I left out...

Lindsey Graham...

I would put him in the first group with Bush, Kasich and Rubio, (he's an intelligent, serious minded fellow) but I doubt he has much chance of being nominated.

If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were the Democratic Party nominee, I would vote Democrat and actively campaign for the party. Otherwise, I will most likely vote Socialist or Green, as usual.

I'll be working for Paul for the republican nomination.

Guinevere wrote:I'll be working for Paul for the republican nomination.

I may even switch to "undeclared" rather than Democrat, so I can take the republican ballot in the primary.

Hmmmm, I'm going to Town Hall tonight to pick up an absentee ballot for the local election in 2 weeks . . . .

Guin--be careful; I remember thinking W couldn't possibly win (and if he did, he wouldn't be all that bad). Surprise, Surprise?

Although Paul would be marginally preferable to some of the pack based on his civil rights positions.

Especially with someone like Paul (or Sanders) who says a lot of things that sound like common sense as long as you don't think about them too hard.

Bush seems to be stepping in it a lot recently over his brother.

Bushisms returneth!!

Being the brother of a former president with a controversial war on his record is proving to be a tricky position for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

On Monday the prospective Republican presidential candidate raised some eyebrows when he responded "yes" to a question about whether he would have approved the 2003 invasion of Iraq "knowing what we know now". Is Jeb standing by Bush's Iraq War decision? It took less than 24 hours for his political supporters to begin walking back that statement, however, after he was subjected to withering criticism from the left and the right.

Ana Navarro, an adviser to Mr Bush who served on his staff when he was governor, said she emailed Mr Bush on Tuesday about the remark, and he told her that he didn't hear Fox host Megyn Kelly correctly.
"I think when you hear the entirety of his answer, and he talks about the faulty information, it's hard not to conclude that he misheard the question," she said on CNN. "Instead of hearing 'if we knew what we knew now', he must have heard 'if we knew what we knew then'." [oh fuCK OFF!!!!] LOL!!

The latter version of the question is a fairly common one for candidates of all political stripes, and - for the most part - it results in a dispassionate discussion of faulty intelligence, missed opportunities and unintended consequences not too different from the way Mr Bush answered.

She's absolutely correct. Here's the full answer:

“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got. In retrospect the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first.”

Clearly he answered the question, "knowing what we knew at the time", there's no other way to interpret his answer. (And obviously Hillary also believes we should have invaded "knowing what we knew at the time" since she voted in favor of authorizing the war, "knowing what we knew at the time") Complete non issue.

Holy crap, how dishonest is that!


"Knowing what we knew at the time". At the time we knew that there was ZERO evidence that Saddam had WMD. And Hans Blix had been looking for evidence of WMD inside Iraq for months, going everyplace he wanted to go with a large team of international weapons experts. And nothing. This was the Hans Blix who learned that during the Reagan and Bush I administrations N. Korea had built a nuclear weapons program; no one else had a clue until then.


Bush's intelligence was not only 'faulty' he just made crap up and lied about it. The rest of the world believed it because Bush had access to the CIA, they didn't, and they (naifs all) didn't think he would just make shit up like that.


There was zero evidence of WMDs. Bush didn't have 'mistaken' information he was too stupid to look at the pile of information he had and say "nope, no evidence of WMD here" and his cabinet (I'm looking at you Colin Powell) were too cowardly or too corrupt to point out that the king was bareassed naked.


yrs,
rubato

BTW, one thing that struck me in that interview is how much weight Jeb has lost; he looks a lot better:

Jeb then:



Jeb now:



Apparently, here's how he did it:

Jeb Bush Adopts a Paleo Diet – and Drops 30 Pounds

While Jeb Bush has yet to announce whether he will officially enter the 2016 presidential race, he's already getting into shape for the role – and he's relying on the Paleo diet to do it.

The former Florida governor, 62, has long struggled with his weight – unlike his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and brother, former President George W. Bush – but has made positive changes in recent months, according to the The New York Times.

The trendy Paleo plan involves a diet devoid of any grains, sugar, dairy, alcohol or processed foods. The name draws from our Paleolithic ancestors, and is meant to emulate their simplistic diet. ["Yeah, just like his Paleolithic politics", yuck yuck yuck...rather than sit around wondering, "Gee, I wonder who will be the first to post that obvious gag?" I thought I'd go ahead and do it for you...]

Bush has reportedly lost nearly 30 pounds since adopting the diet in December, friends told the newspaper. The rapid weight loss has also led to a new wardrobe.

Along with the diet, Bush is reportedly hitting the gym as well as taking to the pool to swim laps on a daily basis.

http://www.people.com/article/jeb-bush- ... paleo-diet

"Knowing what we knew at the time". At the time we knew that there was ZERO evidence that Saddam had WMD.And Hans Blix had been looking for evidence of WMD inside Iraq, going everyplace he wanted to go with a large team of international weapons experts. And nothing.

Holy crap, how dishonest is that?

Rube, I guess this is one of those things, (like "Carter inherited inflation from Nixon" and "Clinton's tax increase caused the economy to take off") that you're just going to keep lying about no matter how many times your falsehoods are debunked:

Lord Jim wrote:

Hans Blix (who caught the N. Koreans making nukes after Reagan and Bush I missed it) had been looking for WMD for months and months and said they were not there.

That's simply wrong.

Blix never reported any such conclusion to the Security Council. In his final report to the UN Security Council prior to the invasion, all he said, (as I have posted before) is that they hadn't found any WMD yet, but that there were large quantities that were known to exist that the Iraqi government had not accounted for:

How much, if any, is left of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and related proscribed items and programmes? So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons, only a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed. Another matter - and one of great significance - is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were "unaccounted for". One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.

Here's the full text:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/f ... ednations1

In fact it wasn't until after the invasion of Iraq, that he said he was even beginning to suspect that Iraq had no WMD:

Friday 23 May 2003 10.39 EDT

The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said he was starting to suspect Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in advance of the war on Iraq, a German newspaper reported today.

"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were none," Mr Blix told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

If that were the case, he said, Iraq's evasive behaviour in recent years could be due to Saddam Hussein's fixation with Iraqi honour and a wish to dictate the conditions under which people could enter the country.

"For that reason, he said 'no' in many situations and gave the impression he was hiding something," he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1

ETA:

There was zero evidence of WMDs. Bush didn't have 'mistaken' information he was too stupid to look at the pile of information he had and say "nope, no evidence of WMD here"

And that's just made up, complete ass yank...

Every major intelligence agency in the world had concluded that Saddam had WMD. The intelligence was believed to be so strong that the CIA director went into the Oval Office and told Bush it was a "Slam dunk" that Saddam had WMD.

In fact in order to believe that Iraq didn't have WMD, you had to believe this narrative, (that no one, including your hero Hans Blix) believed:

"Yes, we had WMD, (the huge stockpiles of it that the UN inspectors never found, but that you found out about when Saddam's son-in-law...who was in charge of our WMD program... defected to Jordan and brought the proof of how much we had with him.)

"But some of that was destroyed by Clinton's airstrikes, and the rest of it...and this is kind of embarrassing...we destroyed, but we didn't bother to keep any records of when or where it was destroyed, so we can't have the inspectors go to where we destroyed it, because we just don't know where that was. But trust us, we destroyed it."

That was the Iraqi story about what happened to the WMD that we knew they had but that they hadn't turned over.

In retrospect, it seems that ludicrous story may very well have been accurate. But it was so wildly implausible, (especially given Iraq's record for deception, and the fact that they continued to behave as though they were hiding it, and also intel indicating that Hussein himself believed they still had WMD) I certainly don't fault Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry or anyone else for not believing it at the time. I certainly didn't.

One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.

this is hardly an endorsement of the W policy of let's go in and find them. Would you really want to commit resources and lives to seeing if something that just might exist can be found? Especially when we had other bigger problems to deal with in the ME after 9/11.

A lot of people jumped on that W bandwagon, including some prominent democrats; but that did not make the Possibility of WMDs any more likely. And some on both sides of the aisle have said that as well, consistently since the time W started the entire fool's venture.

I'm going to wait until the candidate fields on all sides are narrowed down. Hypothetically, sometime after the RNC and DNC national conventions are over. That will help me avoid a lot of unnecessary postulation and baseless speculation for, at least, the next thirteen months.

My guess... I'll probably have the most accurate bead on all this premature candidate selection nonsense at that time. Because life is too short for all this crazy over-thinking I'll let you know my hypothetical choice(s) sometime in July of 2016. DIXI

I'll let you know my hypothetical choice(s) sometime in July of 2016. DIXI

Well Ray, byt that time the party choices will be narrowed down to one each...

I think the GOP field will narrow very quickly after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina...

A whole slew of candidates, who aren't finishing in the top 2 or 3 in those contests will find their ability to raise money completely dry up...